I'm kind of leading a double life- maintaining my home garden and creating a farm in Eldred NY. Because I have big plans for Eldred with raised bed vegeatble planters and some flowers to take to Farmers' Market, I started a lot of seeds in late winter. The statice seed packet said germination would be 20 days so I was very surprised to see upstarts after only 3 days being planted. They grew beautifully and were ready well before planting time in Eldred (which is about 3 weeks later than my home in Toms River NJ). I decided to create a space at home to plant and cultivate them.

After seeing more than 30 deer pass by my back yard, I knew I had to get serious about protecting my summer plants. The deer population has been steadily growing and every year more and more of my garden gets eatten.

I prepared the flower bed at the edge of my patio for the statice seedlings. Statice is an annual flower which can be dried for using in dried flower arrangements. This is a multi-colored seed selection so I'm looking forward to having cobalt blue, yellow, white and coral flowers to dry.

I planted my plants.

At Lowe's I purchased 5 26" plastic stakes and put them around the garden. They have clips on them to attach a wire fence. They cost $2.00 each.

I bought a 50' roll of rabbit fencing- the cost for the fence was about $25.00- cut it to length and put it on the stakes using the clips to hold it in place.

I cut another piece of fence to use as the top and rested it on the patio ledge and twister tied it to the top of the fence- the twister ties become the hinges.

To maintain the garden, I can flip the top of the cage over and weed with a long handled hoe. For harvest, I'll need to pull some of the stakes out to reach the flowers. The total cost for this project was $35.00 for my 20' row. This year, I'm excited to grow my flowers, but someone else may want a vegetable garden and it would work for that too. As you see, the flowers survived the deer!

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